Epic uptime achievement unlocked. Can you beat 16 years?

NetWare 3.12 server taken down after a decade and a half of duty.

It's September 23, 1996. It's a Monday. The Macarena is pumping out of the office radio, mid-way through its 14 week run at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, doing little to improve the usual Monday gloom.

Easing yourself into the week, you idly thumb through a magazine, and read about Windows NT 4.0, released just a couple of months previous. You wonder to yourself whether Microsoft's hot new operating system might finally be worth using.

Then it's down to work. Microsoft can keep its fancy GUIs and graphical server operating systems. NetWare 3.12 is where it's at: bulletproof file and print sharing. The server, named INTEL after its process, needs an update, so you install it and reboot. It comes up fine, so you get on with the rest of your day.

Sixteen and a half years later, INTEL's hard disks—a pair of full height 5.25 inch 800 MB Quantum SCSI devices—are making some disconcerting noises from their bearings, and you're tired of the complaints. It's time to turn off the old warhorse.

It's not a single box, but the WVNET VMScluster has a current uptime of over 17 years. Unlike the single machine, this has been maintaining service through multiple major hardware and operating system upgrades.

No, nor would I want to. Uptime of that long means you haven't applied security updates, and that's simply inexcusable nowadays. Even for systems that are allegedly "secure inside the firewall" -- those are prime targets for hackers who get onto a desktop machine, since they're considered low security risk and tend to have admins that aren't paying attention.

A company that I interned with built all their applications (website, database, reporting) on VMS, and they claimed decades of uptime. I think you'll find most of the systems with the longest uptimes are VMS-based clusters.

Record uptimes and OS's without memory leaks are a good thing, but I can't seriously recommend going that long without a reboot in a production environment. Things tend to fail at the worst possible time, so it's better to plan reboots at convenient times, even if that's just once a year or so.

Being up isn't necessarily working correctly. I've had servers running DEC UNIX on Alpha and Linux that had over a year of up time that were much more responsive after a reboot, though no one was complaining.

I'm currently working with OpenVMS where years of uptime are normal, but it's still better to plan the reboots than have a situation force it on you. We currently reboot between once a year and 400 days, whether it needs it or not.

Wow. I was 15 years old, and would have been learning Perl around that time. As a Freshman in high school. We had Apples in the main computer lab, and when we passed Perl, we'd move to C++ on the Sun Microsystems boxes in the "back room."

I can only say that I'm quite happy we no longer have any Novell servers in production here, it got old having to explain the SysAdmin's intercom pages of "The server has abended, please logoff until it has restarted". Damn Novell and calling a crash an 'abend'...

I've had servers that were in active use go about 3 years max before being out of date enough to really need a kernel update (which mean reboot). Routers, 4-5 years without issue. Anything more than that and usually there is a physical facility move or the equipment is obsolete enough to replace it.

No, nor would I want to. Uptime of that long means you haven't applied security updates, and that's simply inexcusable nowadays. Even for systems that are allegedly "secure inside the firewall" -- those are prime targets for hackers who get onto a desktop machine, since they're considered low security risk and tend to have admins that aren't paying attention.

Keep your uptime. I'll keep my security.

I wonder how many crackers nowadays even know what NetWare is (outside of Wikipedia). The only remaining NetWare installs are usually legacy installs that when they fail, they'll probably replace them with some Linux or Windows servers with more memory, faster processors, and some more hard disk space.